Corning Glass

A 175-year-old glass technology company that exemplifies both institutional knowledge preservation and adaptive radiation—one core competency in ultra-pure silica expressed across every major technology wave since Edison's lightbulbs. Corning invented low-loss optical fiber in 1970, produces over 1.3 billion miles of it, and now sits at the center of the AI infrastructure boom as the dominant U.S.-based end-to-end manufacturer of fiber, cable, and connectivity for hyperscale data centers.

Corning's ability to access 40-year-old research from Project Muscle (1962-1971) enabled the company to develop Gorilla Glass for Apple's iPhone in just six months—an example of institutional immune memory, where archived knowledge enables faster response to new challenges than any competitor starting from scratch. The same pattern now plays out in AI: a 2018 visit to a Meta data center in Dallas, years before ChatGPT existed, sparked a five-year development effort that produced Contour, a fiber product purpose-built for generative AI's fully connected GPU mesh topology.

Meta committed up to $6 billion through 2030 for Corning optical fiber—one of the largest single infrastructure contracts in the AI buildout. Corning supplies every major hyperscaler (Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Apple, Meta) and predicts hyperscalers will become its largest customer segment. Its Hickory, North Carolina cable plant is expanding to become one of the largest fiber-optic cable facilities in the U.S., growing its workforce from over 5,000 to nearly 6,000.

The company's knowledge architecture includes physical archives in Building 301 containing decades of research, a culture where failed experiments are documented as thoroughly as successes, and maintained relationships with retired scientists who can be consulted on rare problems. Moving photons through glass uses five to twenty times less power than moving electrons through copper—making Corning's fiber increasingly essential as power becomes AI's binding constraint.